My Top 5 Songs of 2013

This post, which runs down my five favorite songs of 2012, might come as an anticlimax, given that I've spent the past month and a half intermittently, painstakingly descending from #13 to #6. (I've been busy lately.) But today is February 10, the Grammys are about to begin, and it's time to move on.

So.

#5: Killer Mike, "Reagan"

Too often, it seems to me, the rage in hip-hop is directed at rival MCs rather than, say, the War on Drugs. Or mass incarceration. Or American imperialism. Or the legacy of Reaganomics.

There's plenty of important stuff to be angry about.

Thank goodness, then, for Killer Mike, whose bracing blend of straight talk, unhinged paranoia, social analysis, and righteous anger you will not be seeing on stage at the Staples Center tonight.



"They declared a war on drugs, like a war on terror, / But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever."

#4: Chairlift, "I Belong in Your Arms"

Sweetness and sunlight, open hearts and banana splits. The aesthetic antithesis of Killer Mike's "Reagan." The aural equivalent of the film Amelie. Lyrics consisting of dadaist joy-bursts. Octave jumps! Synthesizers! The 80s! Just the slightest undercurrent of sadness!

All the girls wear polka-dot dresses, and all the boys are uninhibited by masculine norms!

I want to live in this song, even at the risk of turning into a twee lunatic.



"Because the world goes on without us, / Doesn't matter what we do-o-o. / All silhouettes with no regrets, / When I'm melting into you."

#3: Dum Dum Girls, "Lord Knows"

When music critics have no idea what's going on, they use the word "charisma." Why did the Beatles send young concert-goers into hysterics? They played with charisma. What made Michael Jackson different from every other pop star? He danced and sang more charismatically.

And why does "Lord Knows," essentially a pastiche of The Pretenders and "Crimson & Clover," seem unique? Why is it so moving? So much better than anything else by the otherwise unremarkable Dum Dum Girls?

There's something about the vocal. It's really, really....

(Charismatic.)



"I want to live a pure life, / I'd say that it's about time."

#2: Frank Ocean, "Thinkin Bout You"

Yeah, Mumford & Sons (ruthlessly inauthentic as they are) will likely win the Grammy for Best Album tonight. But Frank Ocean's channel ORANGE remains the best loved, or at least the most intensely loved, record of 2012, combining mass and critical appeal in a way that only Kanye West's finest albums have recently matched.

Lead single "Thinkin Bout You" highlights Ocean's most underrated strength: his facility with melody. Listen, for instance, to how he contrasts the circular, low-register verse with the vertical, falsetto chorus. The effect is one of a private, obsessive anxiety releasing into a straightforward ache.

And then you arrive at the bridge. 2:12. Whoa.

(The nonsensical music video I've embedded below features an alternate version of the song. It's the best I could find in the free, legal regions of the Internet.)



"We'll go down this road / Till it turns from color to black and white."

#1: Japandroids, "The House That Heaven Built"

Hey bro, you play air drums. I'll play air guitar. We'll have the BEST F#@$ING TIME EVER.



"And if they try to slow you down, / Tell 'em all to go to hell."

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #6 (Islands, "This Is Not a Song")

There I was, all ready to despise Islands.

In 2006, the Canadian band had a minor indie hit with "Rough Gem," a shapeshifting number with a peppy riff and a kitchen-sink aesthetic. It got passed around the nascent mp3 blogosphere, placed on a few best-of lists, and developed into a rousing concert closer.

But unlike their fellow montréalais Arcade Fire, who also broke through in the mid-aughts, Islands were not ready to be adored. Their music began to take on a willful inscrutability. Band members quit, returned, and quit again. And a few years ago, frontman Nicholas Thorburn announced in concert that he would henceforth refuse to sing "Rough Gem."

Granted, he was being partly, perhaps mostly, tongue-in-cheek. But it's clear that he was also being a bit of an asshole:

This next song we're about to do - it's an old song, and it's a song we all collectively don't like at all. And I think we're gonna retire it tonight... The song is called "Rough Gem." [Crowd cheers.] You shouldn't applaud, 'cause it's a shitty song... I'm not gonna sing it, 'cause I hate this fucking song so much. And here's how much I hate this song. I puked twice up there and then down there. Didn't tell anybody about it. 'Cause I wanted you to smell it. And now I think the whole venue smells like puke 'cause I didn't clean it up and didn't tell anybody. And then someone jerked off 'cause it smells like cum, so that helps. And then I dropped my phone in the toilet, which was cool. I don't know how that relates to this, but I just thought I'd tell you that. Anyway, so I'm not gonna sing "Rough Gem" tonight...

Congratulations, dude. You're better than "Rough Gem." What's more, you're better than anyone who enjoys "Rough Gem," including and especially your fans. You, my friend, are the greatest hipster of all time.

*          *          *

All in all, I would have loved to have kept hating Islands, to have treasured them as my personal paragon of indie insufferability. But, damn it all, in the past six years Nicholas Thorburn has learned a thing or two about songwriting.

On 2012's underappreciated A Sleep and a Forgetting, he uses a minimal backdrop of piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Gone are the addled synthesizers, the jolting shifts in tempo, the GarageBand trickery. Vocals, lyrics, and melodies take center stage. And they're all stunningly well crafted.

The album's second track, "This Is Not a Song," rides a stately chord progression to violin-section solo straight out of R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts." It's a simple, gorgeous ballad - one that Islands should never give up singing.



"If this is just a song, / Then why-y-y-y-y do I fi-i-i-i-ind it so hard... to move on."

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #12 (Ty Segall, "Thank God for Sinners")

A loud, scuzzy opener from Twins, the third of three (!) albums released by Ty Segall in 2012. Yeah, Segall wrote a ton of songs this year - and many of them were very, very good. Eventually something has to give: either quantity or quality. But in the meantime we can admire the apparent ease with which he bangs out tracks like "Thank God for Sinners": sloppy but well-made, catchy but hardly desperate to please.



"I'm out on the streets, you know, / I'm lookin' for you-ooo-ooo."

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #13 (The Walkmen, "Line by Line")

A deep cut from a deep-career album. Like many of The Walkmen's best recent songs, "Line by Line" works with silence, space, and subtle shifts in dynamics. It's a simple tune organized around a simple metaphor, but by the four-minute mark it accrues a complex kind of tension. And then the strings come in: release.



"Line by line, / Oh, we all scrape by."